Public inquiry in social sciences: a pragmatist outlook

Michael Burawoy’s project of a public sociology is reexamined with a pragmatist outlook. This perspective is all the more pertinent as John Dewey has developed a philosophy of the public as a political community. A public emerges when people are perplexed by an act or an event, whose consequences they perceive and evaluate as undesirable. They engage in operations of discussion, inquiry, and experimentation to define and master this problematic situation by which they feel concerned. This perspective, which is closely related to the progressive movement of the 1890s-1920s, was one of the first to raise the question of the relationship of experts with laypersons, and the involvement of citizens in public affairs. Conceptions of participatory democracy based on power-with and common learning were implemented. Here they help us reframing the notions of “public” as a “recipient” and as a “counterpublic.” A model of the triple helix of public experience tries to account for the ways public sociology is rooted in the experience contexts of the actors and circles back there via processes of dissemination, reception, or application.